Are you really arguing the that Windows CE platform was more open than Android?
Back in 2005, an open source Linux based phone was a hippie pipe dream, and carriers were FIRMLY against allowing anything open source on their networks. Android blew all of that wide open, and now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS. This is what we were all dreaming about back then. I feel like this is an incredibly underappreciated fact.
Yes, some carriers lock down their Android phones, because it's an open platform, so carriers can do what they want with it, but since the dawn of Android there have always been high end Android phones that were trivial to put into developer mode and install whatever wacky OS mods you want.
Except the Android of today has not much in common with the Android from ten years ago. Android might be open sourced but is by no means like the linux that you'd run on your PC and is being increasingly built to wall you into Google's services while Samsung and the rest try to remove Google as much as possible from the equation and sway you to their services. Basically you're the cashcow they try to heave around. What a mess to be in.
Oh, and let's not forget that while Android itself is open source, the Android on your phone right now is full of binary blobs for even the basic shit. Camera driver? Image processor? Fast charging? LTE modem? Fingerprint sensor? OLED calibration? most of them are binary blobs specific either to the chip/sensor manufacturer or the OEM who designed the phone as they consider this stuff proprietary IP they wish to keep secret from the other Android OEM competitors. Move to LineageOS and you risk loosing a lot of your phone's fancy features because of that.
I love my Androids but it's still a mess and the openness is slowly going away(since Android 9 we lost call recording capability which was a huge blow for my use case). At least we still have f-droid.
Only devs that don't code for Android can ever consider it an open source Linux based OS.
The fact that it uses Linux kernel and related features is an implementation detail, only visible to Google and OEMs.
What regular developers see is a Java/Kotlin based userland, with a native layer having a set of predefined stable APIs, which includes ISO C, ISO C++ standard libraries, a POSIX subset, GL/Vulkan and a couple of Android specific ones.
Tomorrow Android can be another Fucshia subsystem, and again, only Google and OEMs will notice the change.
> now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS
That's an interesting comment, because it really calls attention to how us nerds often perceive things differently from how the rest of the world does. I am guessing that most consumers would not recognize something that just used vanilla AOSP as an Android phone. Google's closed-source add-ons are a huge part of what people think of when they think, "Android."
> "Are you really arguing the that Windows CE platform was more open than Android?"
The topic is the control that the user has over a phone they purchased, not source code availability for the OS, so yes, I am. Windows CE smartphones provided access about the same as Windows 98/NT in terms of the freedom to run apps and providing apps unfettered access to OS level APIs. The same can't be said for Android and Apple's sandbox + walled garden model.
The only Linux smartphone I can think of from that era that offered similar access and control was the (I think?) Nokia N900 and interest in those was IIRC negligible.
I feel like you're trying to sell the utter lack of a security model as some sort of feature.
Power users and developers have always had the ability to circumvent the Android sandbox on their own devices.
Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems.
N900s were pretty rad little toys, but anything you could do with them you could also always do on Android. The base Android OS doesn't have a built in package manager, but you can easily run a more classic Linux distro in a chroot or something.
Linux Deploy has been around for almost a decade now.
> "I feel like you're trying to sell the utter lack of a security model as some sort of feature."
I'm just describing the way things happened to be back in that era.
> "Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems."
Yes, and? That's just as true of early PalmOS and the other early mobile OSes. Security against malicious apps just wasn't a consideration at that time on smartphones/PDAs precisely because there was no app store and no significant quantity of malicious apps.
Back in 2005, an open source Linux based phone was a hippie pipe dream, and carriers were FIRMLY against allowing anything open source on their networks. Android blew all of that wide open, and now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS. This is what we were all dreaming about back then. I feel like this is an incredibly underappreciated fact.
Yes, some carriers lock down their Android phones, because it's an open platform, so carriers can do what they want with it, but since the dawn of Android there have always been high end Android phones that were trivial to put into developer mode and install whatever wacky OS mods you want.